The Story of an African Farm
Three children grow up on a Karoo farm with a Dutch stepmother and a succession of unreliable adults, and the novel follows them into adulthood with a directness that shocked its first readers. Schreiner published it in 1883 under a pseudonym and it became one of the founding texts of South African literature in English.
The book is uneven and sometimes preachy, but its descriptions of the dry interior are exact, and its treatment of a woman who refuses marriage is unusually frank for the period. The famous ending is abrupt almost to the point of cruelty. It is a novel about what a landscape does to the people who try to own it.
Public-domain status
First published in 1883. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Olive Schreiner died in 1920, so this work has been free to republish there since 1991.
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